Music

Do The Grammy's Even Matter?

First of all, thanks to Deb for posting that "open letter" to the blog. If you haven't read it, do so now.

Steve Stoute's manifesto to "fix" the Grammy's is pretty interesting. His basic complaint is that the voters who decide Grammy winners don't take into account the cultural impact of certain albums, artists, and songs that "define" a generation with their appeal and popularity (aka record sales, radio play, and Youtube hits). Wouldn't that be sweet if they did? An end to shocker awards show winner...with all the deserving frontrunners left standing with their shiny gold grammaphones, buff men, and busts of the Earth glistening in the center of a lighted stage.



My question is, have the Grammy's and other awards shows ever NOT been like the one last weekend? Blood, Sweat and Tears beat out Abbey Road in 1970. Some album by Lionel Richie beat out "Purple Rain." Other years, the classic, culturally important frontrunner albums won. This is the cycle: some years, the frontrunner wins, other years, they don't. So all those times that the most "culturally significant" album didn't win the last decade (Eminem, Kanye, and Bieber v. "unknowns") weren't exactly the anomalies that Stoute makes them out to be.

Here's another question: When the dust settles after all the debate about who should have won a particular award, will the actual award and the award show even matter anymore? Can anyone tell me (without the aid of Google) what album beat out Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP, or the one that beat out Kanye's Graduation? Shouldn't cultural significance in good music (and in bad music) transcend an awards show? Why do we as music consumers need an award show to tell us what albums are culturally significant? Didn't we decide that for ourselves when we kept buying new Eminem and Kanye albums, and kept not buying new Steely Dan and Herbie Hancock albums? Why can't Stoute just do the same thing? He's a record executive after all; he's the one who decides who we get to listen to and think about if it impacts our culture or not!

Why not just get rid of the Grammy's all together? I don't think I've ever heard anybody drop a Grammy winner reference in a conversation about music like Oscar references get dropped in movie conversations. If the whole thing is irrelevant and unnecessary as far as cultural impact goes, why doesn't Stoute just vote to get rid of it? Wouldn't that really fix his problem?

If history is any kind of indicator, last weekend was not the end of Justin Bieber's career. Regardless of whether or not he "deserved" to win, he will continue to become more and more popular, grow as an artist, and possibly contribute to popular music in a way none of us can even predict at this point. He didn't need a Grammy win to get talked about in everyday conversation, and as sad as it is, Esperanza does. In that sense, the Grammy's have done some good, but we won't need them in the future to tell us which artist will be more or less significant, we'll go to the store, get on the internet, talk amongst ourselves, write, and decide that for ourselves.

And at the end of the end of the day, that means that Steve Stoute is just blowing smoke about something that really doesn't matter to consumers like us instead of actually thinking about how artists, albums, and songs come to be thought of as culturally significant, or in other words, HIS JOB.

Sal